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In-flight breakdowns plague Allegiant Air

Ground crew members disperse after preparing an Allegiant MD 82 jet for departure from Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport in February 2012. The company just announced it will start a route from CVG to the New York City market in November.(Photo: The Enquirer/Patrick Reddy)

Allegiant Air’s aircraft are four times as likely to fail during flight as those operated by other U.S. airlines, an investigation by the Tampa Bay Times has found.

Allegiant has identified Cincinnati as an important growth market since launching flights at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport in 2013. The low-cost carrier flies between 17 cities and CVG, however, most of the routes are not operated every day. Allegiant now handles more than 9 percent of CVG passenger traffic.

In 2015, Allegiant jets were forced to make unexpected landings at least 77 times for serious mechanical failures, the Times’ analysis of federal aviation records shows.

To create such a comparison, Times reporters built a database of more than 65,000 records from the FAA.

Working through the data, they connected a year’s worth of flight records with documents showing mechanical problems at the 11 largest domestic carriers in the United States, including Allegiant.

The airline did not dispute the newspaper’s findings, which included:

• Forty-two of Allegiant’s 86 planes broke down in mid-flight at least once in 2015. Among them were 15 forced to land by failing engines, nine by overheating tail compartments and six by smoke or the smell of something burning.

• After certain systems on Allegiant planes fail, the company repairs them and puts the planes back in service, only to see the same systems fail again. Eighteen times last year, key parts such as engines, sensors and electronics failed once in flight, got checked out, and then failed again, causing another unexpected landing.

• Allegiant’s jets are, on average, 22 years old. The average age of planes flown by other carriers is 12. Experts say planes as old as Allegiant’s require the most rigorous maintenance in the industry. But Allegiant doesn’t staff its own mechanics at 107 of the 118 airports it flies to.

• Allegiant relies most heavily on McDonnell Douglas MD-80s, an aging model retired by all but two other major U.S. carriers. The company’s MD-80s fail twice as often as those operated by American Airlines and three times as often as those flown by Delta.

Presented with the Times’ findings recently during an interview at Allegiant’s Las Vegas headquarters, the carrier’s CEO, Maurice Gallagher Jr., said, “I can’t sit here and say that you’re wrong. We’re very much focused on running a better operation.”